“Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom.”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 192.
“To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 195.
“In dominator culture where bodies are pitted against one another and made to stand in a place of difference that dehumanizes, touch can be an act of resistance.”
bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York: Routledge, 2010), 156.
The discipline of art history, and eighteenth-century studies in particular, is experiencing a refreshing burst of energy around material investigations of art objects. To the outsider, such a methodological wave would likely seem perplexing, given that we are a discipline that defines our difference from other humanities fields by our object-centeredness. This apparent paradox is rich. How is it that, as an object-centered discipline, we have had a wavering interest in the materiality and physicality of the objects we study?
I am too junior a scholar to risk answering such a question in print. However, I can account for the impact of materiality-focused pedagogy at the post-secondary level. Whether students are visiting art objects in person or handling them, participating in or witnessing fabrication processes, or otherwise, our research methodologies trickle into the classroom, empowering students to wonder how something was made and to respond with enthusiasm to their embodied encounter with it. And in its connection to the social history of art, material art historical studies also motivates students to consider the global, national, and local structures that mediate the materiality of objects, along with the ideological underpinnings that support such structures.
When I incorporate material encounters into the classroom, I find that students respond with expressions of wonder, awe, enthusiasm, curiosity, and ownership in their learning. It is beautiful to witness a classroom of 20-somethings show passion and excitement about eighteenth-century art history—a topic so incredibly distant from their quotidian experience or their education. Their receptivity to new information rejuvenates my excitement about a field of study I have spent most of the last 15 years thinking about. Unlocking their passion through material encounters permits me to retain my vitality and avoid stagnation as a scholar and a teacher. Their willingness to occupy the vulnerable position of learner, and to extend that vulnerability by showing their delight and appreciation, emboldens me to straddle the balance between mastery and apprenticeship more deliberately in my own scholarly practice.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I deepened my appreciation of Black feminist pedagogies because of a student, who pointed out that my teaching methods were indebted to bell hooks’s germinal Teaching to Transgress (1994). I found myself nodding and sucking my teeth to just about every word of Teaching to Transgress, having arrived at similar conclusions “on my own.” Having struggled to find space to express or explore my complicated ancestry within the scope of European studies, being a mixed Black person of Caribbean ancestry raised in Canada but living in the American South, I have sought Black and diasporic queer radical community outside of academia, where our relational paradigms are already steeped in the scholarship of Black feminist writers such as hooks. And these relational paradigms had, thankfully, permeated my pedagogy.
I had to sit longer with a chapter of Teaching to Transgress (1994) that this student found challenging and subversive: hooks’s “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process.” hooks opens her chapter with a foundational argument that underpins art history’s ontological struggle to accept the undeniable materiality of our subject matter:
Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present and not the body. To call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us….(191)
This dualism has not only impacted how we teach art history. It is, indeed, an important part of art historiography itself, and it underpins many of Fine Arts’ ontological struggles to petition for membership amongst the Liberal Arts across European history. But how it impacts our teaching is of interest to me here for, as educators, we have an opportunity to determine the future not just of our discipline, but of the relationship of future generations to visual culture as cultural workers, brokers, collectors, practitioners, and appreciators.
We have an opportunity to truly deliver on the radical pedagogical potentialities of our discipline’s material turn if we attune ourselves to the ways we can erode mind-body dualism and the unnecessary limitations it imposes on our scholarship and our students. But we cannot do so without acknowledging the role that Black feminist pedagogical radicalism has already played in empowering Western academics to invite students to develop an embodied relationship to art objects and art making within classrooms that historically prefer to ignore or even penalize the existence of bodies. I cannot predict the potential outcomes of fully actualizing the radical pedagogical potentialities of our discipline’s material turn. But by actualizing these potentialities, we have a chance at creating a space inclusive enough that our students might express the wisdom and knowledge of their various inheritances which are otherwise so thoroughly excluded from the classroom, left at the door in order to “switch” into an academic code that excludes the Global Majority. I can only imagine, I can only dream, that a liberated classroom and a liberated academia cannot hide itself away in an ivory tower. And everyone, absolutely everyone, would benefit. Art is moving. Let us move.
Kathryn Desplanque is Assistant Professor of 18th and 19th Century European art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC
Cite this note as: Kathryn Desplanque, “Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7428.
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